Revision as of 08:05, 5 May 2010

Hausa is a Chadic language with the largest number of speakers, spoken as a first language by about 24 million people, and as a second language by about 15 million more. Native speakers of Hausa are mostly to be found in the in the north of Nigeria and in the African country of Niger (where it is an official language in the north), but the language is widely used as a lingua franca (similar to Wolof in Senegal) in a much larger swathe of West Africa.